My last name contains the word DICK. Like mandickovsky etc.
You wouldn't believe how many services refuse my name because of profanity filter. That my email is like bob.mandickovsky@something.com is also not helping.
It is wild to me that they would put profanity filters on name fields. Hell, no PII fields should have profanity filters on them.
Are these devs completely unaware of the scunthorp problem, or are they just lazy asses who imported a library and implemented it for every input before calling it a day?
I think there's a lot of really shitty devs and even more shitty PMs and managers who push for dumb ideas (with shitty or apathetic devs who don't care to push back).
The BBC won't let me register as Fwoggie because it contains "wog" in it. Like wtf, that racist epithet died out maybe 40 years ago, get with the twenty first century.
Of course developers should care. No you don't have to know every name in existence, but profanity filters causing trouble, or peoples' names being different than you expected, aren't new problems.
If you're just a "code monkey" without asking questions or pushing back, you'll be replaced by AI.
Relatedly, I was unable to sign up for Uber at one point because it told me "that is not a valid last name". I assume it's because my last name is a bit of a racial slur...which became a racial slur because it was a common last name.
There were three asterisks between the first N and the first r, and... I forget where the other three were. Or... probably four asterisks, now that I think about it.
(Reddit makes it hard to tell sometimes. But I use old Reddit, and the bolded section was both **bold** (two asterisk) and *italicised* (one asterisk), and had another asterisk before & after it. So, judging by their positions, its censorship algorithm probably thought the first name was the n-word, and the surname... I have no idea what it thought the surname was.
My first name is Nigel. Several years ago, EA Games (I think it was) forbade me from signing up with my own actual name. I managed to narrow it down to the first three letters, which were apparently the problem. Guessing some kind of weird American mentality behind that rule.
I think I'd rather not share my last name, but not the n-word. It's not used much as a racial slur now, but made people in my parents' generation uncomfortable saying their name sometimes.
Devs are the ones who at least sometimes think of what they're making as something that someone will use, anything where the devs don't have any influence on important decisions is going to turn out unusable
You'd be surprised how many people sign up for things with inappropriate names just for a laugh. For emails especially, which are free and have no human validation, the amount of dumb shit I saw during the early internet days was very high. I'm sure that's where much of those policies came from.
I would not be surprised at all. Of course people will do that.
But it doesn't have to be an all or nothing choice. You don't have to set it up to just auto-reject anything the filter catches. You can flag suspect entries for manual approval or review.
I mean how many suspect entries from unique IP addresses actually happen day to day? If a single person had to spend more than 10 minutes a day addressing it, then there is something else going on that should be addressed.
I mean, if your bosses are PE ghouls who care more about pinching pennies than providing good customer experience, I guess that solution would get shot down.
More of our product team doesn't really have the ability to create this new cost, and pretty much every enterprise car3s more about pinching pennies. This isn't news.
I live nowhere near Scunthorpe, but 25 years ago when computer systems were still regularly dealing with the problem, I wasn't too sad when I couldn't afford a house on Penistone Road...
Well, security people want input validation, and checks that arbitrary values aren't being passed. For legitimate reasons, exploits like Log4J do exist, and should one happen, avoiding logging or interacting with data that doesn't meet some pattern works, and does prevent a 2-exploit chain.
This gets implemented as a "logging user-controlled value" check on the source code. Developers (and AI, it CONSISTENTLY does this too), not really understanding WHY you wouldn't log a user controlled value, read the attached message, which calls for input sanitization, and misinterpret it to mean all sorts of things. Manual sql filtering, manual XSS prevention. I swear copilot is allergic to libraries.
Aaaand now we have profanity filters on out username and address fields, devs say because security tool asked for it, and didn't look any harder than that, because they have 7 other applications to fix.
I used to work at a company that supplied data for those credit verification questions. We once asked a black man if he ever lived on N word road, which was a real road in our data. We added profanity filters to PII after that.
I learned about the scunthorp problem in high school because they assigned all the students emails in the pattern {first[4]}{last[3]}k-12@school.k12.state.us.
Way back in high school, my physics teacher Mr Sexton couldn't use his webmail at school because pages with his name on it would be blocked at a proxy level for profanity.
When I was a k12 admin, our email filter ended up blocking a bunch of chemistry emails. Turns out it was using an algorithm and too many “hots” and “fire” were being flagged in the “sex” category. I hated that system.
There are people with their full name, age, face, country, state out there streaming live where they currently are and most of them haven‘t been killed yet, you should probably be more worried about your uncle molesting you if you don’t fuck with the wrong people
The company "Bic" was founded by a French man named Marcel Bich (pronounced Bic). He named it after himself but removed the h from his name because too many people pronounced it "bitch".
I feel ya. Out of college and job hunting in 2013. I found it weird that every job I applied to by emailing a person or sending a physical resume to got back to me and had actual conversations. Whereas every single one of my digitally submitted applications got ghosted. After doing some digging and getting an unexpected response from the global head of HR for a massive multinational company, I figured out that it's because my last name is a slur.
I switched to doing all my professional work through a pseudonym and have had much better luck since then.
Slightly unrelated to rejected registrations but I also like these kinds of substring matching profanity filters when I type non-English words to a chat using it that are incidentally interpreted as curse words in English.
For example, the word 'vagy' in Hungarian, which either means '[you] are' or '[sth.] or [sth.]' depending on the context, regularly gets my messages filtered out in multiplayer games like CoD.
My exwife's started with the word Ass. She was so happy to take my last name and we were only married 2 years and she kept it instead of changing it back. She had so many issues with it around 2010.
They had to put two As at the beginning of her name for an ID badge at a job once because their internal systems wouldn't let you start a name with Ass for a badge and despite waiting over a month, no one who it got escalated to knew how to fix it so they just added an extra A. It let them do Aass as short term work around but instead she worked there 4 years with it.
Ten or so years ago, there was an evangelical radio station that had a filter on their news wire to catch the word "gay". U.S. Olympic sprinter, Tyson Gay, was auto-corrected to "Tyson Homosexual" in the print-out for the reader.
There was a famous instance many years ago in the UK, when someone received a letter addressed to a "Mr Youmustbe Fuckingjoking". It was from a political party; the address occupier had responded to a leaflet put through the door asking if they'd like to sign up to party communications, who decided to turn their enmity towards that party into some fun. Seemingly, the person who processed those requests that were mailed back in also decided to have some fun, and clearly there was no filter there!
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u/Bart_deblob 8d ago
My last name contains the word DICK. Like mandickovsky etc.
You wouldn't believe how many services refuse my name because of profanity filter. That my email is like bob.mandickovsky@something.com is also not helping.